AiGbusted is dedicated to exposing creationist hoaxes, especially the leading organization, Answers in Genesis.

Friday, November 2, 2007

The Debate Part 2

Many of you will remember the debate I started a while. Dave has responded and this is my response to him. The online debate maybe viewed here.

Hello Dave! You seem to have worked hard on your response, but I have a bone to pick with it. Almost all of your links are to True Origin, Answers in Genesis, and ICR, with precious few references to peer reviewed work. These organizations are KNOWN for deception, as both you and I know (you stated that AiG had made an error in their article on whales). If you and I are aware of such sloppiness, why cite it? I also found a quote mine by AiG while reading an article you linked:

(The link to the original article is given if you want to verify it for yourself).

There are many, many more cases of creationist deception on blog. Given that, I did not look through every link given, only at your objections. I numbered them so I could keep track and went through one by one.

Objection 1you are assuming that the geologic strata is constant and accurately reflective of static dates

I am assuming that strata on the bottom of the geologic column are oldest and the ones on top are youngest (except in cases that geological activity has caused a change, which is apparently easy for geologists to detect.).

Objection 2you assume that the number of toes is an indication of sequence, as if the toes sprouted one-by-one, and finding them in ascending order indicates ordered evolution

Yes, I am. There is simply no explanation for them to be in that order other than evolution. I have repeatedly asked you for an explantion of why they are in this order, and you have not given it.

Objection 3Berlinski calculated somewhere around 50,000 interdependent changes had to take place for all of this to happen.

So? Sean Carrol, in his book The Making of the Fittest, calculated that a specific one point mutation would arise and spread 20-100 times over the course of 1 million years, in a population of ten thousand. That means that every single point mutation would arise multiple times, and spread if it were good, over the course of one million years (plus gene duplications and insertions). Whale evolution took many tens of millions of years, so I see no reason to call it impossible.

Objection 4Scientists still disagree over whether or not whales descended from mesonychians or artiodactyls.

Artiodactyls are a sister clade to the Whale, both descended from Mesonychids.

"We start with Sinonyx, a wolf-sized mesonychid (a primitive ungulate from the order Condylarthra, which gave rise to artiodactyls, perissodactyls, proboscideans, and so on)"

"For the first time, morphological evidence shows that artiodactyls are the closest relatives of the cetaceans," Christian de Muizon of the Museum of Natural History in Paris writes in a commentary accompanying the Science report.

"Now I admit the possibility that hippos are a sideline of artiodactyls that might be closer to whales than any other living animals," he remarks.

"In the last few years, 15 or 20 DNA studies have come out supporting this artiodactyl connection," Gingerich notes. "Those weren't taken very seriously, but this finding shows that they need to be. If the studies are done well, the DNA that animals carry in their bodies today gives us a better picture of the past than we might have thought it did." He further asserts that although molecular techniques will never replace paleontology, "they will complement it and expand on what we can competently infer."

Objection 12We just saw how a few teeth have scientists ready to throw the human-ape equation back three million years.

3 million years is not much time in the grand scheme of things (4.5 billion years)

Objection 13Scientists even had to throw the obscure "Little Foot" missing link out because of revised dating.

They did not "throw it out" but because of its place in the fossil record, it is not considered ancestral to humans, just an "offshoot" of the human lineage. To see what I mean, look here (it illustrates the same point of an offshoot):

Objection 17"if I understand your argument correctly, the ERV would require existence in the entire alleged chain of descent from primate to human. According to a report in 2005, these retroviruses were inserted exogenously and independent of supposed human ancestors."

Not true. The ERV's do not have to be present in every single primate alive, because insertions can take place after the ape human split. From the article you site:

"The infections took place independently, and did not originate in a common ancestor of humans and apes. The event also took place between three and four million years ago, well after the separation of humans from apes."

call it "junk propaganda" if you want, but if all the claims are backed up empirically by multiple independent sources, all of whom clearly and unambiguously articulate their methods for corroborating the conclusion with the evidence, then it is you who needs to address the "failings and fabrications" of your ideology.

The "junk propaganda" is actually coming from trueorigins.org and other such websites.

Look at trueorigins and tell me that it doesn't ape the t.o website. It illustrates that creationists are only capable of imitating real science. And as the old saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Why should creationists imitate the look and feel of scientific reports, journals, and websites? Because they realize that this scientific age the Bible will never be accepted as a textbook. In order for people to be receptive to their particular theology of Biblical literalism, creationists must provide cognitive dissonance. They must raise doubts in people's minds about science. And to do that, they cloak themselves in the mantle of science in order to capitalize on the respect and goodwill scientists and engineers have with the general public.

Nevermind that many scientists and engineers are themselves church (or synagogue) going people, and hold the belief that their personal faith does not conflict with scientific knowledge. This is unacceptable to creationists, whose theology requires that mainstream science be discredited. Creationists provide these "alternative" sources in order to effectively "cancel out" mainstream science in people's minds. The idea is that once the scientific knowledge has been pushed out of people's heads, hopefully Biblical literalism will take residence instead.

I can't think of a more bankrupt theology as creationism.

How do you know when a creationist is lying? When he posts to the internet.